He died penniless, but rich with friends

S.F. neighborhoods

Updated 1:18 pm, Thursday, November 8, 2012

Above: Suzy Loftus listens as her mother, Maureen Roche, speaks at a memorial for Bernie Kern and others who died at Laguna Honda.

Above: Suzy Loftus listens as her mother, Maureen Roche, speaks at a memorial for Bernie Kern and others who died at Laguna Honda.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

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Left: Kern was visited at the hospital in the past year by Loftus' daughters, 7-year-old Maureen (left), and 5-year-old Vivian.

Left: Kern was visited at the hospital in the past year by Loftus' daughters, 7-year-old Maureen (left), and 5-year-old Vivian.

Photo: -, Courtesy The Loftus Family

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Maureen holds the note she wrote to read at the group memorial service for Kern and 27 others who died at the hospital.

Maureen holds the note she wrote to read at the group memorial service for Kern and 27 others who died at the hospital.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

He died penniless, but rich with friends

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It was just before sunrise when Bernie Kern wheeled himself to an outdoor plaza at Laguna Honda Hospital for his usual morning cigarette. He'd been living in the hospital for five years, but four decades of homelessness before that had left him with an enduring affection for the early morning chill and quiet.

The cigarette was done in a few minutes. It was his last.

Kern was found peacefully slumped in his wheelchair just outside the elevator, his heart given out from the long years on the streets.

That was Oct. 9. He was 90.

Having long outlived every relative he knew, there was no family to claim him. The normal city policy in such cases is to cremate him along with other unclaimed indigents, then scatter his ashes into the ocean with all the others on a routine run by a city-hired boat.

And if that were the end of it, he'd be forgotten like many of the 150 or so other homeless people who die in San Francisco every year.

But Kern isn't forgotten.

He left behind a Hayes Valley woman, her daughter and her grandchildren who met him on the street and had come to adore him, and a staff at the hospital that grieved so hard for Kern at a memorial service last week that many could not speak through their tears.

"I thought I'd kick it before he did," Maureen Roche, the 67-year-old woman whose family helped shepherd Kern through his final decade, said at the service through trembling lips. "He was a wonderful man.

"Oh, he had a hard, hard life. But such a wonderful man."

Introverted at first

Kern went into Laguna Honda in 2007 so introverted he'd spend all day with his bedsheets pulled up to his nose. But by the time he died, the wiry man with the wispy white beard had become the life of his ward - telling tall tales, saving candy for kids and zippingthrough the hallways so quickly he made the nurses grin.

Studies have shown that most hard-core homeless people have difficulty surviving outside past late middle age. Lasting until age 85 made Kern a rare stone in the cruel current of street life - and one of the most resilient homeless people ever seen at Laguna Honda, the rehabilitative hospital of last resort for those with little or no income in San Francisco.

"When he first got here he was bed-bound and weak," said Laguna Honda social worker Paul Kelly. "He didn't trust anyone except for Maureen and her family. But then after he'd been here a while, he perked up.

"And oh, the stories he told."

Nobody could tell if his tales were true, but they were told often and with conviction, said Roche. One of his favorites was about how, as a young man working a salad counter in New York, singer Ella Fitzgerald dropped a $5 bill from her coat pocket.

"He always called her 'Miss Fitzgerald,' and he said when he picked up the bill to give it back to her she was so touched she gave it to him," said Roche. "And then there was the time he met Al Capone - 'He was an intense guy,' Bernie said. Or the time he met Willie McCovey and they talked about baseball, or Charles Bronson at a bar. It went on and on."

Rough childhood

From the thin records available on Kern and the details he offered repeatedly at different times, Roche's family and the hospital staff assembled a picture of a rough start in life.

He was born in New York City, and when he was 8 his father abandoned his mother - who put Kern, his two brothers and one sister into an orphanage. The family reunited when the mother remarried, but the drunken stepfather beat the children.

As a young man Kern worked at Horn and Hardart, the first food service automat in New York and the place where he said he met Fitzgerald. Then came World War II, when he was injured as an Army private in Europe.

At the time of his death he still got a small monthly disability check from Veterans Affairs. He shrugged off inquiries about his injury.

Kern said his mother passed away in 1954 and his siblings died after that. He never gave names.

That's where the story gets fuzzy until the early 1960s, when he moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco. By all accounts, he'd lived in cheap hotels, doorways or alleys ever since, trying hard to dodge conflict and to stay out of sight at night.

"I'm sure he had PTSD from his time in World War II," said Kelly. "His isolation, not trusting people, inability to cope back in society, refusal of treatment - it all fit."

Met at Hayes Valley

Roche, a retired hospital manager, and her daughter, former San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Suzy Loftus, met Kern seven years ago when they saw him at what had become his regular daily hangout - a milk crate at the corner of Octavia and Hayes streets. He didn't panhandle. He just sat.

Other homeless characters have come and gone at the corner, from a guy with a fishing pole to a screaming man, but Kern endured until he became part of the landscape for locals and visitors alike.

Man on a milk crate

"He was always there on that crate listening to baseball games with a little portable radio," said Loftus, 38. "My mom would buy him cigarettes and coffee - he called it 'cwa-fee,' in his thick New York accent - and he kept pretty much to himself. But we really came to like him."

As Loftus' daughters - Maureen, 7, Vivian, 5, and Grace, 3 - grew old enough to talk, the women took them to visit Kern, too. He refused help beyond small kindnesses, complaining when they spent more than a buck or so on java. When his radio broke they bought him a new one.

"Then one day four years ago we went to see Bernie, and he was missing," said Roche.

It turned out he had fallen - he was using a walker by then - and reluctantly agreed to let emergency workers and street counselors take him to San Francisco General Hospital. From there he went to Laguna Honda.

"Once he got into Laguna Honda, the gruff of the streets came off and the warmth came out," said Loftus. "He loved my kids so much he'd squirrel away hard candy and chocolate and give it to them when we'd visit. He wanted to save the best of what he could get for them.

"He was always so gentle, so good with them. And us."

His new vigor wasn't lost on the other patients, either.

"He went really fast in his wheelchair," said patient Paul Hendrickson, 51, who also uses a chair. "I don't know where he was going, but he wanted to get there fast."

Peaceful passing

As his health declined in recent weeks, Kern kept such a sunny disposition that even the kids were unfazed.

"He always had something to talk about," said Maureen. "He was the only one left in his family, but I think we all were enough, and he liked his life. I loved Bernie. He was my friend."

When the Medical Examiner's Office could find no kin to claim his body, Loftus got permission from the city to step in. Between her family and friends, including several police officers, she was able to quietly raise $2,100 to have Kern's body cremated at a Daly City mortuary and the ashes will be privately scattered at sea.

When the boat chugs out sometime in the next week or so, she and her family will be on it.

"The way Bernie lived, and the way Laguna Honda took care of him, to me, show the value and the dignity of human life," Loftus said. "After all the effect he's had on our family, it wasn't right for him to be buried or scattered anonymously like that.

"We felt we had a responsibility to send him off properly. He just couldn't be forgotten by us."

When he died, Kern had $1.09 left in his personal account at the hospital. But he had a fine funeral - and, as he often liked to, he got the last word.

The funeral was held Oct. 15, and it was actually a group memorial held every three months for those who die at Laguna Honda. Twenty-seven others were honored, and a giant photo of Kern dominated the podium.

The service was about to end when one organizer said she had a surprise. She popped a CD into a stereo - and out poured Kern, singing the 1940s-era standard, "On the Street of Regret," not long before he died.

His rendering was shaky, but in tune. He sounded happy as he lingered over the words:

"When you're alone with your dreams of the past, and you realize what love means at last,

"Just remember the glory of love's sweet story, when you're alone on the street of regret."

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